


Why Wait

by soulshrapnel



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Gen, Gifts, Life day, holiday fluff, somebody get this baby a toy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:33:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21945910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soulshrapnel/pseuds/soulshrapnel
Summary: Mando has never given gifts for Life Day before, but it looks like the kid's gonna need one.
Relationships: Baby Yoda & The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 400





	Why Wait

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a lil bit of fluff that I wrote for my nesting partner for the holidays. We couldn't afford a ton of presents this year so I wanted to do something else to make the day special. Now that he's read it, everyone else can too.
> 
> Yes, I know that Life Day is a Wookiee holiday and is not literally Christmas, but for the sake of cute holiday fluff we're just gonna go with it.

Mando didn't usually celebrate Life Day. It wasn't one of the traditional Mandalorian holidays, most of which revolved around the creation of particular armors or the celebration of historical battles between Mandalore's various clans. Besides, he was working. Marks let down their guards around Life Day. They got distracted by the festivities. Easy pickings, good pay, often a larger reward than the going rate on account of it being a holiday. That was what Mando liked about Life Day.

But, as he walked through yet another backwater market with the Child's floating cradle in tow, just a pit stop on the way to the next job, his eyes were drawn to the seasonal displays. Mando was a careful observer, with a habit of scanning the details of his environment for tools and threats, but this was different.

Bare tree branches topped with frost or draped with cheerful ribbons. Piles of gifts, wrapped in colored paper. _Treat your family,_ said the signs - to good food, to a getaway somewhere warm, to one colorful bauble or another.

The Child, in his float cradle, looked at all of it with wide eyes. He cooed softly and his pink ears flicked.

Mando had a family now, he supposed. He could treat it.

*

Mando was used to being paid well for his work, but work came less often now that he wasn't Guild. After subtracting basic rations, ship fuel, armor maintenance, and the other necessities of life on the run, there wasn't much left. The little gift he'd bought and wrapped wasn't much, compared to the piles of gifts he'd seen in those displays. But there was limited room on the Razor Crest anyway. He had to start somewhere.

The real problem was keeping the gift away from the Child. It wasn't Life Day yet, after all.

Five minutes after setting a course through hyperspace, Mando heard a scrabbling noise. The Child had climbed out of his cradle and was toddling directly for the cupboard at the side of the cockpit where Mando had stashed the gift. The Child's eyes blinked, wide and intent, and he held his three-fingered hand out before him, as if guided by magic and not by sight.

"Hey, not in there," said Mando. He scooped the Child up and tucked him back into his cradle. The Child giggled and hugged him as he was carried.

Mando did not know how to entertain a child. He'd learned quickly how to change diapers, how to find food that the Child could digest, how to hold him properly. But the subtleties of parenthood confused him. The Child got restless if they flew too long; he needed mental stimulation, and Mando wasn't sure how to give it. His birth parents were long gone, unaskable. His Mandalorian family, too, had been left far behind.

There wasn't much entertainment available on the Razor Crest. Mando was all business and didn't need much of it himself. There was the metal ball from the ship's controls, though; the Child liked that one. Mando unscrewed it and handed it to him. The Child held it to his face, intently focused, and cooed.

While the Child was distracted, Mando moved the gift to his weapon locker and locked it.

A few hours later, intent on a detail of hyperspace navigation, he heard a crash.

Mando leapt up from his pilot's chair. His first panicked instinct was to check the Child's cradle. It was empty. He rushed down the ladder to the source of the noise.

The lower level of the Razor Crest was in disarray. The Child, in an attempt to get at the weapon locker, had somehow climbed on top of a pile of chairs. Half of them had already fallen over, but the Child's own vantage point still miraculously stood. He teetered on the edge of the pile, reaching out with his stubby green hand toward the locker's door.

Mando hurriedly picked him up. The Child made a complaining noise and the whole tower of chairs fell with another crash to the ground.

"We don't do that here," Mando scolded, climbing back up the ladder with the Child in tow. Was he supposed to punish kids for things like this? He didn't know. He'd rather not.

The Child, unpunished, whimpered again as Mando set him back in the cradle.

"It's a Life Day gift," Mando tried to explain. "You don't open it until Life Day. Apparently." Not that he'd really grown up with this holiday anyway, but he was pretty sure that was how it was done.

The Child squeaked complainingly and held up his hands. Mando sighed, then picked the Child up again, maneuvering him into his lap as he settled back into the pilot's chair.

"We're coming up on Lothal in a few hours," he explained, gesturing to the nav controls. "From there we'll make another jump into the Unknown Regions."

The Child had never spoken, and Mando wasn't sure how much Basic he understood. Sometimes he suspected that the Child knew much more than he let on. Sometimes he saw a depth in those big dark eyes that he couldn't quite explain. An uncanny timing in how the Child moved. Other times - like last week when he'd tried to eat the power coupling - the Child seemed possessed by very standard baby dumbness.

He liked it when Mando talked to him, though. So Mando tried his best.

Later, when the Child was sleeping, he tucked the gift into a secret compartment in the ceiling. The Razor Crest had a smuggler's cache up there. Mando had rarely used it; he preferred hunting people, not ferrying drugs or weapons. The Child had never seen it open, and nothing within it could be seen, heard, or smelled from the outside. The smuggler's cache would keep the gift safe, he thought. At least for the night.

*

Mando woke up to the sound of the Child's giggles. He was a quiet baby who rarely cried, but this morning he was making a lot of sound, squealing and laughing in delight. Mando pushed himself upright - he'd been asleep in his pilot's chair with his helmet on, as usual - and groggily took in the scene.

There was no possible way that the Child could have opened the ceiling compartment, but the compartment gaped open above him. The wrapping paper lay shredded on the floor. The Child was sitting up in his cradle, playing with what had been hidden inside: a complicated little toy, several concentric layers of brightly colored plasteel which could each open or shut, spin across each other, tilt or turn. The toy floated now above the Child's outstretched hands, and he chuckled and squeaked as its different parts turned, one way and then the other.

It wasn't going to be Life Day until three standard cycles from now.

But the Child didn't know that. The Child only knew, through whatever magic power the Child possessed, that this was for him.

Mando sighed. "Okay, kid. Happy Life Day."

The Child looked back at him and happily cooed. Mando took it as a 'thank you.'

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Why Wait](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28508481) by [LittleRedRobinHood](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedRobinHood/pseuds/LittleRedRobinHood)




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